In the autumn of 1813, I left my house at Henderson, on the banks of
the Ohio River, on my way to Louisville... The air was literally filled with pigeons; the
light of noonday was obscured as by an eclipse; the dung fell in spots,
not unlike melting flakes of snow, and the continued buzz of wings had a
tendency to lull my senses to repose.

Before sunset I reached Louisville, distant from Hardinsburgh
fifty-five miles. The pigeons were still passing in undiminished numbers
and continued to do so for three days in succession. The people were
all in arms. The banks of the Ohio were crowded with men and boys
incessantly shooting at the pilgrims, which there flew lower as they
passed the river. Multitudes were thus destroyed...

It may not, perhaps, be out of place to attempt an estimate of the
number of pigeons contained in one of those mighty flocks, and of the
quantity of food daily consumed by its members. The inquiry will tend to
show the astonishing bounty of the great Author of Nature in providing
for the wants of His creatures. Let us take a column of one mile in
breadth, which is far below the average size, and suppose it passing
over us without interruption for three hours, at the rate mentioned
above of one mile in the minute. This will give us a parallelogram of
180 miles by one, covering 180 square miles. Allowing two pigeons to the
square yard, we have 1,115,136,000 pigeons in one flock. As every
pigeon daily consumes fully half a pint of food, the quantity necessary
for supplying this vast multitude must be 8,712,000 bushels per day...

Let us now, kind reader, inspect their place of nightly rendezvous... The dung lay several
inches deep, covering the whole extent of the roosting place, like a
bed of snow...
As the period of their arrival approached, their foes anxiously prepared
to receive them. Some were furnished with iron pots containing sulphur,
others with torches of pine knots, many with poles, and the rest with
guns.. Suddenly there burst forth a
general cry of “Here they come!” The noise which they made, though yet
distant, reminded me of a hard gale at sea passing through the rigging
of a close-reefed vessel. As the birds arrived and passed over me, I
felt a current of air that surprised me. Thousands were soon knocked
down by the pole men. The birds continued to pour in. The fires were
lighted, and a magnificent as well as wonderful and almost terrifying
sight presented itself. The pigeons, arriving by thousands, alighted
everywhere, one above another, until solid masses as large as hogsheads
were formed on the branches all round. Here and there the perches gave
way under the weight with a crash and, falling to the ground, destroyed
hundreds of the birds beneath, forcing down the dense groups with which
every stick was loaded. It was a scene of uproar and confusion. I found
it quite useless to speak, or even to shout to those persons who were
nearest to me. Even the reports of the guns were seldom heard, and I was
made aware of the firing only by seeing the shooters reloading.

No one dared venture within the line of devastation. The hogs had
been penned up in due time, the picking up of the dead and wounded being
left for the next morning’s employment. The pigeons were constantly
coming, and it was past midnight before I perceived a decrease in the
number of those that arrived... Toward the approach of day, the noise in some
measure subsided, long before objects were distinguishable, the pigeons
began to move off in a direction quite different from that in which they
had arrived the evening before, and at sunrise all that were able to
fly had disappeared. The howlings of the wolves now reached our ears,
and the foxes, lynxes, cougars, bears, raccoons, opossums, and polecats
were seen sneaking off, while eagles and hawks of different species,
accompanied by a crowd of vultures, came to supplant them and enjoy
their share of the spoil.

It was then that the authors of all this devastation began their
entry among the dead, the dying, and the mangled. The pigeons were
picked up and piled in heaps, until each had as many as he could
possibly dispose of, when the hogs were let loose to feed on the
remainder.

Persons unacquainted with these birds might naturally conclude that
such dreadful havoc would soon put an end to the species. But I have
satisfied myself by long observation that nothing but the gradual
diminution of our forests can accomplish their decrease.

The latter proved to be a prescient comment. The last known passenger pigeon died in 1914, as a result of combined predation and habitat loss.

Addendum: Reposted from 2013 to add some salient paragraphs from an essay in Harper's Magazine (November 2015) entitled "Rethinking Extinction: Toward a less gloomy environmentalism" -

The birds that most of us eat today are chickens — lots of them — and
turkeys, with the occasional duck, quail, or pheasant thrown in. So it
is something of a shock to remember that, not so long ago, Americans
were happy to eat just about anything with wings. An 1867 inventory of
fowl available in the game markets of New York City and Boston featured
not only wild turkeys, partridges, and grouse but also robins, great
blue herons, sandpipers, meadowlarks, blue jays, and snow buntings.

In season, passenger pigeons were especially plentiful. Alexander
Wilson reported they were sometimes eaten for breakfast, lunch, and
dinner. The pigeon potpie — sometimes garnished with pigeon feet stuck
in the middle — was common fare in colonial America. Passenger pigeons
were preserved for out-of-season consumption by being salted, pickled in
apple cider, smoked to make jerky, or sealed in casks with molten fat.

According to Schorger, the birds were “a boon to the poor”: in 1754, a
half dozen sold in New York for a penny, a sum equivalent to thirty
cents today. In times of surplus, they were fed to hogs.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, railroads had connected the
cities of the eastern seaboard to the great nesting colonies of the
Midwest. Word of the flocks’ locations spread rapidly thanks to another
new technology, the telegraph, which allowed professional market
hunters, as well as local amateurs, to converge on a site.

The most common way to kill passenger pigeons was to shoot them. Because
the birds clustered so densely, no great skill was required to blast
them from trees or out of the sky with a shotgun. Nets were widely used
as well. Trappers broadcast grain and deployed captive “stool pigeons”
to attract the birds, enabling them to snare hundreds at once. Captured
pigeons could be killed by crushing their skulls between the thumb and
forefinger, though, as Schorger notes, “It was difficult to continue
this method without fatigue when many birds were handled.” Some hunters
used specially designed pliers to break the birds’ necks. Others used
their teeth...

Starting at age 6, Samantha began drawing pictures of murder weapons:
a knife, a bow and arrow, chemicals for poisoning, a plastic bag for
suffocating. She tells me that she pretended to kill her stuffed
animals.
“You were practicing on your stuffed animals?,” I ask her.
She nods.“How did you feel when you were doing that to your stuffed animals?”“Happy.”
“Why did it make you feel happy?”
“Because I thought that someday I was going to end up doing it on somebody.”
“Did you ever try?”
Silence.
“I choked my little brother.”..

When Samantha got a little older, she would pinch, trip, or push her
siblings and smile if
they cried. She would break into her sister’s
piggy bank and rip up all the bills. Once, when Samantha was 5, Jen
scolded her for being mean to one of her siblings. Samantha walked
upstairs to her parents’ bathroom and washed her mother’s contact lenses
down the drain. “Her behavior wasn’t impulsive,” Jen says. “It was very
thoughtful, premeditated.”...

One bitter December day in 2011, Jen
was driving the children along a winding road near their home. Samantha
had just turned 6. Suddenly Jen heard screaming from the back seat, and
when she looked in the mirror, she saw Samantha with her hands around
the throat of her 2-year-old sister, who was trapped in her car seat.
Jen separated them, and once they were home, she pulled Samantha aside.
“What were you doing?,” Jen asked.
“I was trying to choke her,” Samantha said.
“You realize that would have killed her? She would not have been able to breathe. She would have died.”
“I know.”
“What about the rest of us?”
“I want to kill all of you.”

The article continues with extended discussion of the role of the amygdala and the possible biology of the disorder. I thought this was interesting:

The best physiological indicator of which young people will become
violent criminals as adults is a low resting heart rate, says Adrian
Raine of the University of Pennsylvania. Longitudinal studies that
followed thousands of men in Sweden, the U.K., and Brazil all point to
this biological anomaly. “We think that low heart rate reflects a lack
of fear, and a lack of fear could predispose someone to committing
fearless criminal-violence acts,” Raine says. Or perhaps there is an
“optimal level of physiological arousal,” and psychopathic people seek
out stimulation to increase their heart rate to normal. “For some kids,
one way of getting this arousal jag in life is by shoplifting, or
joining a gang, or robbing a store, or getting into a fight.” Indeed,
when Daniel Waschbusch, a clinical psychologist at Penn State Hershey
Medical Center, gave the most severely callous and unemotional children
he worked with a stimulative medication, their behavior improved.

That aphorism was cited in the movie "Iris" (excellent, btw...) and was unfamiliar to me. It was not unfamiliar to Edward deVere:

“If it be true that good wine needs no bush,
'tis true that a good play needs no epilogue;
yet to good wine they do use good bushes,
and good plays prove the better by the help of good epilogues.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

As early as 1873, Walter W. Skeat wrote authoritatively (as was his wont) that bush in the saying good wineneeds nobush
“is well known to be that which was tied to the end of an ale-stake.”
Perhaps so (though we will see that what is well-known may not be
indubitable), but there was a Latin proverb sounding suspiciously like
its English analog: “Vino vendibilis suspensa hedera [“ivy”] non (or nihil) opus est.” As Shakespeare’s Taverner explains at the close of As You Like It:
“Wine that is saleable and good needeth no bushe or garland of yvie to
be hanged before.” This aphorism, in the Latin form cited above, has
been attributed to Erasmus. In any case, it is “modern” and apparently
had no currency in England before Shakespeare’s or at least Camden’s
time...

I would like to refer to a note by R. R. Sharpe in Athenæum/2
for 1888, p. 260. In a document going back to 1350, he found evidence
that it had been customary to place a bunch or bush of rosemary or other
herb in a drinking vessel, either to give a particular flavor to the
beverage or, as he remarked, to disguise the inferior quality of the
wine. “Of bush in this sense it is clear that good wine stands
in no need.” Sharpe’s conjecture sounds convincing (and, if so, the
traditional reference to the pole is the product of folk etymology).

I favor the sense that "bush" refers to "enhancement" rather than "advertisement," but it's a matter of little import. More at the link.

They just look different from one another. Some look to be continuous sine-wave curves, while others resemble staggered split-rail fences. But they all have the same shape. The optical illusion arises from the way they are colored.

The illusion was developed by psychology professor Kohske Takahashi of Chukyo University. Via Neatorama.

Pleaching or plashing is a technique of interweaving living and dead branches through a hedge for stock control. Trees are planted in lines, the branches are woven together to strengthen and fill any weak spots until the hedge thickens. Branches in close contact may grow together, due to a natural phenomenon called inosculation, a natural graft. Pleach also means weaving of thin, whippy stems of trees to form a basketry effect.

This photo, and the watermarked one here, show the equipment used at the palace to accomplish the effect:

Although the top photo was described in the discussion thread as an example of pleaching, a review of Google Images retrieved by keyword pleaching suggests that the process at the palace is just elaborate pruning, without the interweaving indicated by the term "pleaching."

Haircuts/hairdos, along with clothing and makeup, have always served as tools by which anyone can declare (or disguise) their social status and worldview. In an article at Buzzfeed, a hair stylist explains how she helps men look less fascist.

We love our race, the alt-right began to loudly proclaim. They also love their undercuts — the “fashy” look, as fascists like to call it. But many others have loved the undercut before them.

When the undercut grew popular in the German empire ruled by Prussian kings in the late 1800s, it was known as der Inselhaarschnitt
— the island cut, in reference to the patch of hair sitting atop a
shaved head. English street gangs, like the Peaky Blinders in
Birmingham, were soon wearing the same style, and it made it to the
United States on the heads of working-class European immigrants.

As
Hitler’s Third Reich rose to power, its members embraced the undercut
as a way to connect with the military success of the Prussian armies
that came before them. Later, it became popular in the US Armed Forces,
but in the wake of World War II it became associated with wartime
violence, and European men chose looser, short hairstyles to counter the
military connection.

It resurfaced in black barbershops, where
fades and military cuts transformed into edgy sharp styles. The hi-top
fade emerged in part out of the undercut in those barbershops during the
1980s and early '90s, wrote Quincy Mills in Cutting along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America, and was most popularized by the coolest of the cool, Grace Jones.

What’s fascinating is how one haircut has signified so many different
things, across different historical moments and different
constituencies. As a queer stylist, it’s a cut I saw in militaristic
homoerotic photography in the 1990s and fashion magazines in the 2000s.

More at the link. Comments closed here; if you wish, you can contribute to the snarky miscommunications at the Buzzfeed thread.

"I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works. The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. You are being programmed"

I pretty much agree with this guy (he was one of the original Facebook executives). Worth listening from the 21:20 mark to about the 25:30 mark or so.

"Iris" was released in 2001, but I saw it for the first time last evening. It's really not so much a biography of Iris Murdoch as it is a lamentation on the ravages of Alzheimer's. Anyone who has a family member with this affliction will appreciate the forthright but sensitive treatment of the subject in this film.

10 December 2017

I've blogged on several occasions about squirrels' nests ("dreys"). At our latitude they are a prominent feature of the suburban landscape, especially when one lives next to a woods.

I've always been intrigued at how squirrels are able to tolerate arctic cold in such a porous structure, but I've been even more fascinated by the apparent sturdiness of what would appear to be a fragile construction (dead leaves and twigs).

"This phenomenon, when leaves fail to fall, is called marcescence.
Most evident on all the oaks around the metro, it's an explainable but
puzzling occurrence. At the petioles, the point of attachment to the
tree, hormones flow back and forth. As the days shorten and temps fall,
the amount of one in particular, auxin, is reduced. The area becomes
sealed and a digestive enzyme helps to release the leaf. In fancy
science talk, this all happens in the abscission zone."

This year I had the opportunity to test and illustrate the process. In late summer I needed to prune some branches of a large oak tree that were shading our vegetable garden. After I clipped off a small branch, instead of tossing it on the brush pile I brought it indoors. In time the leaves duly shriveled, turning a dark green rather than brown. But they didn't fall off. Today I took it out in the back yard and held it up in front of its parent tree (photo), which dropped its leaves after a couple freezes and windy days.

After I took the photo I shook that branch vigorously. The leaves stayed attached. When I grabbed the leaves with my hand and squeezed, they were friable and crumbled to fragments. So I suppose the squirrels must use fur or other padding not only for warmth but also to prevent traumatizing the leafy branches that make up the next (as suggested by the illustration here).

Not the "national debt," but the debts of individual Americans, as depicted on this map (my embed is a screencap - the interactive version here lets you zoom in on your state and your county for data).

2016 data derived from a random sample of deidentified, consumer-level
records from a major credit bureau, as well as estimates from summary
tables of the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (2015 or
2011–15)... Debt in collections includes
past-due credit lines that have been closed and charged-off on their
books as well as unpaid bills reported to the credit bureaus that the
creditor is attempting to collect.

Links to various commentaries at Digg. My attention was drawn to Minnesota...

A previous analysis by the Urban Institute focused on medical debt,
and found one reason it was so concentrated in the South was because
the uninsured rates tended to be higher. While that changed to some
extent with the Affordable Care Act, many Southern states chose not to
expand Medicaid. On the other hand, Minnesota — which has the lowest
rates of debt — has one of the most generous Medicaid programs in the country, and a more inclusive and higher-quality health care system.

...only 3% of Minnesotans have medical debt in collections, and only one
county (rural Clearwater County) has medical debt rates over 11%.

Compare that picture to the state of medical debt in the rest of the
country. Nationwide, 18% of people have medical debt in collections,
and, as CityLab noted, much of that debt is concentrated in states that
chose not to expand Medicaid under the ACA.

Most Washington politicians are tone-deaf to the financial crises experienced by so many Americans. They are busy waging their internecine battles, meeting with lobbyists, and pandering to their donors.

07 December 2017

Jellyfish have been referred to as the "cockroaches of the sea," with reference to both species' ability to survive under the harshest conditions. An article in the newest edition of The Atlantic reviews a new book about jellyfish:

Their delicacy notwithstanding, in recent decades jellyfish species have
come to be thought of as the durable and opportunistic inheritors of
our imperiled seas. Jellyfish blooms—the intermittent, and now widely
reported, flourishing of vast swarms—are held by many to augur the
depletion of marine biomes; they are seen as a signal that the oceans
have been overwarmed, overfished, acidified, and befouled... The
vision—hat tipped to science fiction—is of the planet’s oceans
transformed into something like an aspic terrine. In waters thickened by
the gummy mucus of living and dead jellyfish, other sea life will be
smothered. Because jellyfish recall the capsules of single-celled
protozoa, this eventuality invites portrayal as a devolution of the
marine world—a reversion to the “primordial soup.”..

Perhaps the most complex issue Berwald takes on is jellyfish blackouts.
Sweden, Scotland, the Philippines, Tokyo, California, and Israel have
all suffered intermittent electrical outages caused by jellyfish sucked
into the intake pipes and cooling systems of coal-fired and nuclear
power stations... In Spineless, Berwald travels to Spain’s Murcia region and takes
us to the Mar Menor lagoon, which had become so jellified in 2002 that
“you couldn’t drive a boat through the water.” Here barrel and fried-egg
jellyfish are pernicious—so much so that they’re removed from the sea by the bargeload and dumped into ditches near the airport.

In 2006, the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan was incapacitated while visiting Brisbane, Australia due to blubber jellyfish swarms. Reportedly,
cooling pipes for the ship’s nuclear reactor were clogged with the
foot-wide jellies, necessitating an evacuation of the carrier...

Ironically, the jellyfish problem is partially of China’s own doing. As
many as one hundred million sharks are killed each year, much of it in
the form of bycatch in an attempt to catch other forms of seafood but
also for shark’s fin soup, a delicacy in China. Although demand for the soup has declined in recent years,
the shark population is still way down. Sharks are a major predator of
jellyfish and scientists believe their absence is a major reason why
jellyfish populations have exploded.

The combine continued along, following the contours of the planting
lines automatically recorded months earlier by G.P.S. As we moved, our
progress was charted on the touchscreen in varying colors to show where
each row or part of a row was above or below the target for
bushels-per-acre for this field. All of that data is recorded and stored
to plan for next year, helping farmers decide how to adjust the density
of their seed populations, where to apply fertilizer, how much to
water, where to add inputs, and where to save money...

So to make your best profit on soybeans, you need a sunny day (but
not too sunny) with a dry breeze (but not too dry), and you need that
day to fall exactly when the plant has received the precise number of
hours — yes, hours — of sunlight from the moment you planted it months
earlier. To make hitting such a tight window even remotely possible,
seed companies, like Rick’s supplier, DuPont Pioneer, have hybridized
soybeans for nearly a century — and genetically modified them in recent
decades — according to bands of latitude called maturity groups. They
number these photoregions from 0 in the northern growing zones of Canada
to 7 in the light-drenched flatlands of Florida. But Nebraska is almost
exactly divided between groups 2 and 3, the line bisecting the state
into north and south. Most farmers here, especially in central regions
like York County, plant both varieties to spread out their risk, but
some daring farmers like Rick will formulate a guess as to what the
weather holds for the growing season and plant more of one group, hoping
for higher yields and higher returns.

In 2014, after several years of drought, Rick bet on another dry
year — and planted incredibly short-season beans. While most of his
neighbors were planting 3.5s, Rick planted 2.4s. And he was dead-on,
right up until the rains started...

In my mother's childhood, her dad planted seeds, harvested a crop and saved some of the seeds for the following year. (No longer. Most people know that seed-saving now can be punishable in a court of law.) But what grandpa planted in Minnesota was probably the same seed that someone in Wisconsin or Illinois would plant. What I learned from this article is how hyperspecialized the hybrids are now according to latitude of the field. I found this map at a University of Missouri ag school website:

Although temperature affects soybean growth and development, soybean
plants are also quite sensitive to photoperiod. The lengths of the
light (photoperiod) and dark periods within a 24 hour day change each
day. These changing photoperiods regulate the timing of flowering and
other stages of soybean plant development. Soybean is classified as a
short day plant because flower initiation is stimulated when
photoperiod is shorter than a critical value. Critical values differ
among varieties and are determined by a variety’s genes.

Photoperiod lengths differ among latitudes on
any specific day. After the first day of spring and until the first day
of fall, photoperiods are larger as latitude increases (further
north). Because of soybean’s sensitivity to photoperiod, soybean
varieties are assigned to one of 13 maturity groups. These maturity
groups are adapted to relatively narrow bands of latitude. In North
America, MG OOO is adapted to southern Canada; whereas, MG 10 (X) is
adapted to Mexico and the Caribbean Islands.

(More at their link). Now note - those are not microclimate zones like most people are familiar with for household gardens. Those bands don't vary according to rainfall and max hot/cold - those are just daylight duration bands. Other adjustments need to be made for local weather and climate.

It didn't surprise me to see an article in The Guardian this week entitled "Why are America's farmers killing themselves in record numbers?"

Last year, a study
by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that
people working in agriculture – including farmers, farm laborers,
ranchers, fishers, and lumber harvesters – take their lives at a rate
higher than any other occupation. The data suggested that the suicide
rate for agricultural workers in 17 states was nearly five times higher
compared with that in the general population.

After the study was released, Newsweek
reported that the suicide death rate for farmers was more than double
that of military veterans. This, however, could be an underestimate, as
the data collected skipped several major agricultural states, including
Iowa. Rosmann and other experts add that the farmer suicide rate might
be higher, because an unknown number of farmers disguise their suicides
as farm accidents.

The US farmer suicide crisis echoes a much larger farmer suicide
crisis happening globally: an Australian farmer dies by suicide every
four days; in the UK, one farmer a week takes his or her own life; in
France, one farmer dies by suicide every two days; in India, more than
270,000 farmers have died by suicide since 1995...

Since 2013, net farm income for US farmers has declined 50%. Median farm income for 2017 is projected to be negative $1,325.
And without parity in place (essentially a minimum price floor for farm
products), most commodity prices remain below the cost of production.

In an email, Rosmann wrote, “The rate of self-imposed [farmer] death
rises and falls in accordance with their economic well-being … Suicide
is currently rising because of our current farm recession.”

More at the link. Neither political party has effectively addressed the farm recession in this country. National politicians tend to equate American economic prosperity with a rise in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

I've often wondered what modern GPS-equipped tractors and combines cost to purchase or lease. Perhaps some reader will know.

But the corn had snapped from its stalks and fallen to the dirt days
earlier, the result of what agriculture experts called a perfect storm: A
series of weather conditions over the growing season that had been
good, and then bad, for certain hybrid seed varieties, producing
big-kerneled ears but weakening their grip to the stalks...

In Makovicka's most damaged field, he counted 70 bushels of corn per
acre — grain he couldn't salvage, couldn't sell at the elevator. Rees
has heard of northeast Nebraska farms that lost 100 bushels per acre, or
nearly $50,000 of missed income on each quarter-section...

The problems will extend beyond harvest. Many growers will be forced
to pay for more herbicide, when the corn they couldn't harvest this year
sprouts among their soybeans next year. Some farmers who graze their
cows in harvested fields are realizing, after it's too late, that their
animals are gorging on more corn than their bodies can handle.

“I'd
never had a problem and I've been doing it for 30 years,” said Steve
Wenz, who farms near Firth. “I put them out on a Tuesday morning and,
Thursday morning, I had three dead ones.”..

During pollination, high heat weakened the shanks — the tie between the
corn and the stalks — and cool August temperatures resulted in bigger
ears. “They produced really heavy kernels, really deep kernels. There
was quite a bit of weight.”

October rains contributed to stalk rot, followed by the damaging winds... Certain seed varieties proved more vulnerable than others, and the loss varied from farm to farm, even from field to field.

Intricate squiggles and numbers are scrawled all over the prints,
showing Inirio’s complex formulas for printing them. A few seconds of
dodging here, some burning-in there. Will six seconds be enough to bring
out some definition in the building behind Dean? Perhaps, depending on
the temperature of the chemicals.

As a youngster I developed some of my own film and studied (but never implemented) advanced darkroom techniques. I began to wonder if I would ever see the phrase "dodge and burn" used again.

06 December 2017

Mountain Rose apples are a red-fleshed apple variety and a member of the
Rosacea family, species Malus domestica. This apple gets its name from
the fact that it is grown near Mount Hood in Oregon, and because it has
brilliant rosy red flesh... The Mountain Rose apple is yellow to green, covered extensively with a
red to pink blush, and speckled with faint white lenticels. The skin is
quite delicate and can bruise easily. Their real claim to fame is the
bright pink to red flesh that remains vivid even when cooked. The flesh
is crisp and has a balanced acidic yet mildly sweet flavor with nuances
of strawberry, citrus, and cotton candy.

[Walmart] has pulled a t-shirt bearing the message “Rope. Tree. Journalist. SOME
ASSEMBLY REQUIRED” from its website after the Radio Television Digital
News Association (RTDNA) sent a message to Walmart alerting them to the
shirt’s controversial content.

The shirt was also sold in the online store of a company called
Teespring, who was acting as the third-party seller for Walmart’s online
listing of the product. Teespring has since removed the shirt from its
website...

A shirt with the words “Black women are trash” prompted outrage in May
of 2017 when links to buy the shirts on Teespring’s site appeared on
social media and went viral...

...a shirt emblazoned with “Eat Sleep Rape Repeat” was not just being sold
on Teespring’s site, it was marked as a “best selling tank/shirt.”

That would be Croatia, for those a bit rusty on world geography. The pool (or underworld portal) is said to be 150 meters deep. It's not surprising that ancient peoples would position churchs near such sites.

The most recent (December 2017) issue of The Atlantic features a cover story about Andrew Anglin, founder of The Daily Stormer. It's a long read and a frankly disturbing one. It's a real eye-opener for anyone who doubts the intensity of hatred in modern America. I'll place an excerpt below the fold...

01 December 2017

When I first saw this photo, my reaction was that a designer or architect was being unnecessary clever. But after studying it, I realized it is an eminently practical solution to a problem.

The problem being an extremely steep rise/run ratio for the location of the stairs. The distance from the front step to the hallway behind is short, the vertical distance to be traversed high. The choices would be extremely tall steps, extremely narrow steps, or perhaps a ladder/spiral staircase/other design.

I found more information at Fine Homebuilding, which discusses the practical aspects of stairway dimensions and also includes this interesting one:

"I built one of these as the replacement staircase to my basement. my
1829 house was moved to a new foundation in 1915. the basement stair
location under the main level staircase approaches the foundation wall.
the previous case used a landing and a 90 deg turn. this could only be
negotiated without ducking ones head if you were under 5 foot tall.
the alt tread case with comfortable wide treads uses half the normal
needed run. this allows me to walk upright for the entire flight and get
feet on basement floor with a 3+ foot distance from the foundation
wall.

3 caveats. one must be able to lead with both feet. NEVER
attempt to turn around mid flight. use of these stairs is much easier
with handrails on both sides. I made mine as a utility purposed design
with a center a center stringer that you must straddle. this rail has
allowed me to move/slide large heavy objects up and down the staircase-
both a refrigerator and a freezer - with use of a rope block &
tackle. once you are familiar with the stair, it is actually easier to
hand carry large boxes down that obstruct your vision. you never need
to step past the tread you are standing on to get your other foot onto
the next tread. leg motion is a straight drop. never stumble over the
nosing."

"the magnetic tipped top attaches to the perimeter of the paperclip- but
since the top has much more mass, the paperclip is put into curious motion due to Newton's 3rd law and the top's rotational inertia."

30 November 2017

... a site in China’s Turpan-Hami Basin in Xinjiang has coughed up 215
beautiful, pliable and miraculously three-dimensional eggs — 16 of which
contain embryonic remains. The researchers also suspect there could be
as many as 300 more eggs within the same sandstone block...

What’s more, the egg treasure trove also boasts skeletons from what appear to be hatchlings, juveniles and adults... Pterosaurs ran the gamut from the gigantic, aircraftlike Quetzalcoatlus all the way down to animals about the size of a sparrow, such as Nemicolopterus. Some had the long, pointy snouts we typically associate with the flying reptiles. Others boasted wild and crazy crests...

Illustration by Zhao Chuang. More about pterosaurs at Wikipedia. And by the way...

TYWKIWDBI continues to support Wikimedia/Wikipedia every year and encourages you to do so as well.

In two previous posts I reviewed the first three novels written by John Dickson Carr, each featuring the French detective Henri Bencolin. We now come to the final two of this rather small corpus of five Henri Bencolin mysteries.

"The Corpse in the Waxworks" is a conventional murder mystery set in Paris in the 1920s, with no locked rooms. At several points in the story the author incorporates elements of a "action thriller," and he offers a somewhat melodramatic ending, so it is a bit unlike the iconic mysteries that Carr will craft in his more mature years.

It's a good story, and I have to admit the killer was (as usual) not on my mental list of likely suspects.
I won't be giving out any spoilers, and will just use this occasion to highlight some interesting tidbits encountered while reading the book:

"The legend, then, says that when [Bencolin] wears on these occasions an ordinary sacque suit, he is out for pleasure alone."

The sacque suit was the appropriate day dress for all men. The suits
that had been worn before this time [1920s] were big, broad-shouldered suits and
since men were striving for the more youthful look, they began wearing
suits that were skinnier and did not have padded shoulders. The suit
pants also went through a change too. Creases became a big thing, they
were found on the front of pants. Another thing added to pants were
cuffs and they drew more attention to their shoes. Both of these things
were added to pants to give off a sharper look. Belts were also becoming
popular to wear with pants, instead of wearing suspenders. The belts
were said to be "waist-slimming."

"In the brief weird glare I saw the gleam of black brilliantined hair..."

Brilliantine is a hair-grooming product intended to soften men's hair, including beards and moustaches, and give it a glossy, well-groomed appearance. It was created at the turn of the 20th century by French perfumer Édouard Pinaud... it consisted of a perfumed and colored oily liquid.

(Interestingly, when the movie Grease was shown in France, it did so under the title Brilliantine.)

"... a girl of nineteen or twenty, with vivacity in the dark eyes, soft full lips, and a weak chin... This was no midinette..." ("A female salesperson, a shopgirl, especially in Paris; a vacuous but fashionable young woman.")

"But Bencolin had seated himself facing the blaze, fallen into a study, with his gaunt figure slumped and his chin in his hand." Lots of detectives seem to fall into studies - I think Sherlock Holmes must have done so on several occasions. I understand they are thinking, but why they have to "fall" into this state is a bit puzzling. Now that I think about it, one also "falls" asleep. Odd. No time to look this up.

"In this poetic way, Monsieur Bencolin would say that I am lord of the jackals - king of the cockleshells - high priest of demonology." A phrase apparently borrowed from a popular turn-of-the-century play entitled "If I Were King."

"Streetwalkers, graven of face, with motionless black eyes..." Don't know if this is to imply deathlike or immobile like a carved figure. ?

"I could see a glimmer of light through one window, whose leaves were open." Makes sense, but I've never seen this usage.

"The Comte de Martel... wears an old-fashioned stock, eyeglasses on a black ribbon, a box-pleated cape..." ??? - not sure what that means. [answer in Comments]

And finally - "The Four False Weapons."

Carr's first four novels were written in the early 1930s. After he published The Corpse in the Waxworks, he tried out some other detectives - including seven Gideon Fell novels and five featuring Sir Henry Merrivale. I'm going to break the chronological order here and skip forward to 1937, when Carr reintroduced Henri Bencolin for one final novel.

Before I had even finished the first chapter it was obvious how Carr had matured in his writing style in this five-year interval. The narrative is much more readable, the characters better defined (crucial when trying to pick our a murderer from the bunch). He reintroduces Bencolin as a "retired" detective who just happens to live in the vicinity of the crime.

Again, I won't address the plot, so as not to present spoilers for potential readers. This sentence near the end summarizes the puzzle - "Pistol, razor, stiletto, and drug tablets; there were four weapons in the case, and all of them are false. Rose Klonec died of..." (I would clarify that all the weapons were essential to the sequence of events, just not the actual cause of her death).

Now on to some selected curiosities:

"The most famous legend of the great Doctor Samuel Johnson is that Boswell once asked him, "Sir, what would you do if you were locked up in a tower with a baby?" Johnson's reply is not noted in this narrative and it's been decades since I read Boswell's Life. Does anyone know what his reply was?

"... slipping along the rue de Rivoli in one of those new, sleek, wine-colored taxis which have replaced the quacking cabs of old..." Odd way to describe a cab. ???

"In the wall to Curtis's left was the half-tester bed..." A "tester" is a canopy over a bed (or over a pulpit). I guess from the Latin testa = "shell." "Half" presumably because it's only at the top of the bed (pix) (vs "full tester bed").

"Madame doses herself with sleeping-tables on the same night that she burns with impatience to meet her lover? Whiskers to you! You make me laugh." The sense is obvious, but it's a curious phrase. Anyone seen it before?

"Now that I've thrown my bonnet over the windmill, I want to see and do everything I can." I found that as the name of a play from the 1930s. Someone else may want to look up the implications.

"And yet the moment the goose falls out of the larder you apparently threaten me with criminal prosecution if I have any curiosity about a weapon found on the very scene of the murder." ????? way too obscure for me.

""The old witch," Bencolin said at length, shaking his fist. "The yellow-eyed Bubastes with the thirty-nine tails. The swine-snouted polecat with the armor-plated hair," he amplified, defying the laws of zoology..." Bubastes is a genus of beetles. ????

"He was having his rolls and coffee by the window when the 'phone rang..." With an apostrophe, to mark the absence of "tele." Grammatically correct, of course, just odd.

"But, Although Doctor Freud is Distinctly Annoyed, I still haven't done anything yet." Mr. Google found this for me:

The young things who frequent picture palaces
Have no use for this psycho-analysis.
And although Doctor Freud
Is distinctly annoyed
They cling to their old-fashioned fallacies.

Apparently limericks were fashionable in the 1920s, and this one was
well-enough known to be highlighted with capital letters in the text of
this novel. And I suppose "fallacies" is a pun on phalluses.

"But he knew that the bank [in a card game] must have lost heavily. In any but a world of cloud-cuckoo-land De Lautrecs, the bank would have won..." Found this in Wikipedia: "Aristophanes... wrote and directed a drama The Birds, first performed in 414 BC, in which Pisthetaerus, a middle-aged Athenian persuades the world's birds to create a new city in the sky to be named Nubicuculia or Cloud Cuckoo Land..."

That's all (or at least that's enough.) This was a complex mystery - perhaps a bit too much so. The solution is explained in stages; several incorrect solutions are offered, each of which explains some details - unlike some Agatha Christie mysteries, for example, where everything is held back until the final reveal.

Thus endeth the John Dickson Carr mysteries featuring Henri Bencolin. After he published this one he moved on to other detectives, which is what I'm going to do now. These five books may or may not be available from your local library. All five are available at Amazon for a combined $25 or so.

If anyone is interested, my five copies (used paperbacks) are now listed on eBay for an opening bid of $9 + Media Mail shipping. eBay item # 253287113539.

29 November 2017

While it ensures their rights, the
looseness of the law is a source of frustration for Freyseth and
Johnson, who have been forced to contact police when untrained service
or therapy animals have attacked their own dogs, which can be scarring
to the animals and cause them to lose focus on the task at hand. A
particularly traumatizing incident could render the dog unable to
continue working, an especially harsh loss given the $40,000 and several
months invested in training.

“The
hardest part is when we run into fakes,” Freyseth said. “We don’t know
where they are, and one attack can change our dog forever. I get
scared.”

While unauthorized service capes and harnesses can be easily purchased
online, Johnson says an animal’s manner is a clear indicator of its
legitimacy. Growling, lunging, excessive barking and energetic
playfulness are hallmarks of untrained animals, as is the language the
owner uses for discipline.

So why are the Democrats not making more noise about a giant
reverse-Robinhood scheme, that at least on the Senate side, also
includes moves to gut Obamacare by ending the tax penalty for not
carrying health insurance. If passed, that provision would allow
millions to drop their coverage, which in turn, would raise premiums for
everyone else. Remember how last summer Dems rose in the House and
Senate to remind Republicans that tens of thousands of voters in their
districts would lose their healthcare?

The answer — and
it’s a theory, but one honed from covering national politics — is too
many Democrats across Congress are still beholden to wealthier
constituents, whether individuals who contribute to their campaigns,
corporate employers who threaten to leave if they don’t get more
corporate welfare, or people in their social circles who get invitations
to Kennedy Center galas...

“This time around, much more clearly than before, the goal seems to be
to favor wealth, especially inherited wealth, over work. And buried in
the legislation are multiple measures that would make it much harder for
the children of the middle and working classes to work their way up,”
Krugman said, citing examples...

Why aren’t Democratic leaders raising more hell about the worst GOP tax
plan ever? Why aren’t they doing more to stop a juggernaut from getting
closer to passing, one that panders to those who don’t need more money
at the expense of future generations? Why are so many Democrats acting
like the majority of Republicans?

28 November 2017

Jon Stewart ended his remarkable sixteen years on television with one final series of incisive comments to his viewers. I haven't found an "official" transcript of the program, so here is my best effort in that regard (boldface, formatting, and links added by me):

Bullshit is everywhere.

There is very little that you will encounter in life that has not been, in some ways, infused with bullshit - not all of it bad. General day-to-day organic free-range bullshit is often necessary, or at the very least innocuous. "Oh, what a beautiful baby. I'm sure he'll grow into that head."

That kind of bullshit in many ways provides important social contract
fertilizer that keeps people from making each other cry all day.

But then there's the more pernicious bullshit, your premeditated institutional bullshitdesigned to obscure and distract. Designed by whom? The bullshit talkers.

Comes in three basic flavors: One - making bad things sound like good things.

Whenever something's been titled Freedom, Fairness, Family, Health, and America, take a good long sniff. Chances are it's been manufactured in a facility that may contain traces of bullshit.

Number Two, the second way - hiding the bad things under mountains of bullshit.

Complexity - you know, "I would love to download Drizzy's latest Meek Mill diss." (Everyone promised me that that made sense.) "But I'm not really interested right now in reading Tolstoy's ITunes
agreement, so I'll just click "Agree" even if it grants Apple prima noctae with my spouse."

Here's another one - simply put, simply put - banks shouldn't be able to bet your pension money on red.

"Hey, a handful of billionaires can't buy our elections, right?" "Of course not. They can only pour unlimited anonymous cash into a 501c4 if 50% is devoted to issue education; otherwise they'd have to 501c6 it or funnel it openly through a non-campaign-coordinating superpac with a quarter... I think they're asleep now. We can sneak out."

And finally, finally, it's The Bullshit of Infinite Possibility.

These bullshitters cover their unwillingness to act under the guise of unending inquiry.

"We can't do anything because we don't yet know everything."

"We cannot take action on climate change until everyone in the world
agrees gay marriage vaccines won't cause our children to marry goats who are
going to come for our guns. Until then, I say "teach the controversy."

Now, the good news is this: bullshitters have gotten pretty lazy, and their work is easily detected.

And looking for it is kind of a pleasant way to pass the time - like an "I Spy" of bullshit.

So I say to you tonight, friends - the best defense against bullshit is vigilance.

An editorial from Der Spiegel about Trump after the Charlottesville incident: "Trump is a racist. He is a preacher of hate. Those who pretend he is
not, those who portray him as merely being an unpolished, somewhat
chaotic old man, as a person who explicitly sought to avoid becoming a
slick politician, are merely enabling him... When the president of the United States says that the victim is just as
responsible as the murderer, or that the counterdemonstrator is just as
guilty as the Nazi waving the swastika flag and shouting, "Jews will not
replace us," and when Trump's own party doesn't drop him even now, then
Duke and Trump have already achieved a key goal. Tolerance, empathy,
kindness and diversity of opinion are all disparaged as political
correctness. It becomes OK to say anything else, and if you can say it,
it becomes easier to justify violence. The wheel of civilization has
made a turn in reverse."

Trump's command of the English language is not good: “We have a lot to discuss, including the fact that there is a new and
seems to be record-breaking hurricane heading right toward Florida and
Puerto Rico and other places,” he told reporters. “We’ll see what
happens. We’ll know in a very short period of time. But it looks like it
could be something that will be not good. Believe me, not good.” Here’s a list of other things Trump has said were “not good.” [list follows]

In a September interview, John le Carré drew parallels between Donald Trump and the rise of fascism in the 1930s. “These stages that Trump is going through in the United States and
the stirring of racial hatred … a kind of burning of the books as he
attacks, as he declares real news as fake news, the law becomes fake
news, everything becomes fake news. “I think of all things that were happening across Europe in the
1930s, in Spain, in Japan, obviously in Germany. To me, these are
absolutely comparable signs of the rise of fascism and it’s contagious,
it’s infectious. Fascism is up and running in Poland and Hungary.
There’s an encouragement about.” Even today, Le Carré said, Ang Sang Suu Kyi is speaking of “fake news” in Burma. “These are infectious forms of demagogic behaviour and they are toxic.”

A Harvard psychiatrist rejects the "Goldwater Rule" (that health professionals should not publicly discuss public figures) and labels Donald Trump a sociopath: "Everybody lies some of the time, but in this instance we mean people who
lie as a way of being in the world, to manage relationships and also to
manage your feelings about yourself. People who cheat and steal from
others. People who lack empathy . . . the lack of empathy is a critical
aspect of it. People who are narcissistic... It is not just bad behavior that people have to lie and cheat the way he
does, it is an incapacity to treat other people as full human beings.
That is why his focus is on humiliating others to aggrandize himself... Lying and cheating and humiliating others and grinding them into dust in
order to triumph is not just bad behavior. It is a serious mental
illness."

Donald Trump on Twitter June 2014: "Are you allowed to impeach a president for gross incompetence?"

"On a weekend in early March, during one of seven trips by Trump and
his White House entourage to the posh Palm Beach property since the
inauguration, the government paid the Trump-owned club to reserve at
least one bedroom for two nights. The charge, according to a newly disclosed receipt reviewed by The Washington Post, was $1,092... “The choice to stay there and have the government pay the $546-a-night rate seems imprudent,” said Kathleen Clark, a Washington University law
professor who specializes in ethics issues. “If it were not owned by the
president, it would still seem problematic. The fact that it’s owned by
the president makes it doubly problematic.”

"President Trump delivered a brief speech to African leaders
Wednesday at the United Nations, and in the span of about 800 words, he
twice conjoined the names of two countries, Namibia and Zambia, creating the nonexistent nation of “Nambia,” and told the leaders that many of
his friends go to Africa to “get rich.”"

George Clooney takes umbrage at Trump's disparaging of the "Hollywood elite": Here’s the thing: I grew up in Kentucky. I sold insurance door-to-door. I
sold ladies’ shoes. I worked at an all-night liquor store. I would buy
suits that were too big and too long and cut the bottom of the pants off
to make ties so I’d have a tie to go on job interviews. I grew up
understanding what it was like to not have health insurance for eight
years. So this idea that I’m somehow the “Hollywood elite” and this guy
who takes a shit in a gold toilet is somehow the man of the people is laughable... "I just look at it and I laugh when I see him say 'Hollywood elite,'" he
said. "Hollywood elite? I don’t have a star on Hollywood Boulevard,
Donald Trump has a star on Hollywood Boulevard! Fuck you!""

September: "President Donald Trump will kowtow to New York's elites at a private
dinner Tuesday, with donors willing to shell out up to $250,000 for an opportunity to sit next to the commander in chief. Some of the most
prominent names in finance and real estate are set to attend the event
at Manhattan's Le Cirque restaurant to raise money for the Republican
National Committee... Now the president seems eager to accept the money of coastal elites,
even though he has masqueraded as a populist looking out for the common
man..."

October:"Trump's Fascistic, un-American rantings about NFL players kneeling in
protest during the playing of the National Anthem are offensive and
repugnant. But they're also probably illegal, carrying a possible penalty to Trump of disqualification from public office, fines, and up to 15 years in prison. "(explanation of the legalities at Boing Boing: There's a specific statute at play, and it's 18 U.S.C. sec. 227....)
"Last week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) quietly voted along party lines to eliminate its “main studio rule,”
which mandated that local news stations maintain offices within the
communities they serve. Without the main studio rule, Sinclair is free
to consolidate and centralize local news resources in its roughly 190
stations across the country, eliminating the “local” element of local
news as much as possible. This move is just the latest
in a thriving symbiotic relationship between the openly conservative Sinclair and the Trump FCC, a relationship that seems to benefit all parties but the American public. And there’s more to come.

"Try
building your cars in the United States instead of shipping them over.
Is that possible to ask? That's not rude. Is that rude? I don't think
so."

That statement had to be puzzling for the Japanese carmakers, because they have been making many of their cars in the United States for
years now. Nissan makes 9 of their autos here, Toyota makes 9 of their
autos here, and Honda makes 11 of their autos here. These Japanese auto
makers have created thousands of jobs in the United States. If there were any Japanese who didn't realize we elected a moron with
massive ignorance to be our president, then this has probably removed
any doubt.

After Trump attacked Marshawn Lynch's behavior at an NFL game and then opined that he should have left the UCLA shoplifters in a Chinese jail, Snoop Dog didn't pull any punches. Text at the link is abundantly Bowlderized with asterisks.

Trump's criticism of Obama for blocking the Keystone pipeline ("good for the environment, no downside!") paired with the CNN headline about the Keystone pipeline leaking 210,000 gallons of oil in South Dakota.

"Tai-wiki-widbee" is an eclectic mix of trivialities, ephemera, curiosities, and exotica with a smattering of current events, social commentary, science, history, English language and literature, videos, and humor. We try to be the cyberequivalent of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities.

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I'm using an old photo of my grandfather as an avatar; he would have been amused.
Readers - especially old friends, classmates, students, former colleagues, and long-lost relatives - are welcome to email me via retag4726 (at) mypacks.net